For those who came in late..
For those of you living under a rock there’s been an incredibly nasty, sensationalist and flat-out deceitful campaign by the Liberal/National Parties (and the big polluters that pay their campaign funds). Abbott as leader has staked his reputation on killing this legislation in favour of a scheme that would tax everyone and give extra tax cuts to big polluters while spending tax dollars planting trees to offset emissions that would continue to be free for polluters. Yep, doesn’t make any sense and only a brave economist would be lining up to sing the praises of Abbott’s alternative.

CO2 price Concepts
Anyhow, the basic concept is that CO2 is no longer to be treated as unlimited free pollution as it has been so far throughout history. The first step is a rather small one really (despite the amount of apocalyptic predictions of LNP supporters pissed off that the NBN didn’t kill the country): top 500 polluters will be tracked and made to pay (to varying degrees) $23/tonne of CO2 (Abbott seemed to think that CO2 was weightless, gives you an idea what kind of twit we are but one or two parliamentarians away from running the country).

Handouts.. some needed, others not
The bit that comes with an attempt to soften the impact is a whole bunch of compensation, not only for end consumers (more than compensating majority of households) but also for a bunch of industries that might be impacted by it. This sparked a whole bunch of the Plasma Proletariat and just plain ignorant people thinking that they would be worse off when in fact they would be making money. I’m one of the people who will not be compensated, although as a 100% green power user I’d expect my major costs to have already been taken care of by my energy plan being from wind power. But that didn’t stop a bunch of low income people from insisting they’d be broke when the calculator showed they would be making money. This loud complaining was partnered with a rather scary anti-science climate change denial stance by masses of people.

The 7 stages of Climate Science Denial

Cars continue to pollute for free

Petrol was for some insane reason (perhaps thanks to short sighted campaigning by organisations like the NRMA) excluded.. So no end in sight for the rise of the car and petrol fumes on the street. The sooner we get rid of fossil fuels from our vehicle transport the better. Can you imagine how many places would be infinitely more liveable with less traffic noise and fumes? How many respiratory issues would go away. It would certainly be nice to be able to breathe deeply in CBD areas during lunchtime.

Seems likely to work

I think the notion that pollution that was free now costing something will immediately result in businesses looking to reduce costs. Anyone who claims otherwise has no idea whatsoever about how businesses work. Cost is about the only language that you can speak to businesses that have legal obligation to put profit above all else if you expect them to pay attention. End consumers can exercise their choice by taking their money where the lower cost from pollution efficiency results in a competitive advantage. Businesses will start working groups to examine how they can improve efficiency and we take a step toward a leaner, less polluting industry.

Hell, they might even figure out a way to make that snake oil clean coal work?

So let’s hope that it makes it through.. So what if we’re wrong about it all? Well, we all win.

My response:

Dear NRMA,
Your promise to “seek assurances from the Australian Government that the Carbon Tax would not force up the cost of fuel” is absolutely ridiculous! I’m a member and I strongly object to any attempt by the NRMA to campaign against what will be a minuscule rise in petrol prices. You are also ignorant of the current proposal to more than adequately compensate low income earners for any increase caused by such a price on CO2 emissions. For you to ignore this and insist that petrol prices remain the same is attempting to negate any benefit of such a policy.

I didn’t see the survey to take part in it, but rest assured if you do go down this path you will not get another year of membership out of me. I don’t want to belong to and fund any organisation that digs in on climate action, I’ve got a reliable enough vehicle that I don’t need your services.

Where was the NRMA voicing its concern on the gulf war when it resulted in a massive increase in petrol prices? The whole idea of a price on emissions is to drive (no pun intended) people toward less polluting ways.. How does that happen if you succeed and the CO2 price is matched by a reduction in other taxes. The poor/low income earners will be compensated, so you’re going in to bat for people who can well afford any small increase in petrol prices.

How about you lobby the petrol companies as they seem to have forgotten that our dollar is up and that the hikes they jacked up during the last instability in oil prices seem to have stayed high.

The NRMA should be exercising some social conscience and supporting the price on CO2 emissions, something which excessive car use and failure to invest in public transport, electric cars etc.

Arguing that price at the petrol pump is the only thing that matters is the trademark of a sociopath. It’d be like going back a few decades and arguing that removing lead from petrol was too expensive and that kids getting lead poisoning wasn’t an important factor. Transport emissions are a significant slice of the overall green house emissions and you are arguing that they be ignored.

A bit of advice: take your feigned outrage over a tiny rise in petrol prices and instead use your lobbying effort to campaign for charging stations, commitment to electric vehicle research and roll out.

To argue for the govt to make sure it reduces tax by exactly the same amount that the CO2 price puts on is missing the whole point. Yes, it will cost more, that’s so that people reduce their emissions to keep their costs down. Low income earners will be compensated, so you aren’t doing this for poor people who can’t afford it.

Perhaps spend the time to look at what you’re asking and to consider the environment a bit more. You seem to be pushing for some good quality greener outcomes elsewhere, so just try a bit of consistency. The CO2 price/tax/whatever rise is nothing compared to the middle eastern oil price rises.
If we can get on to electric: we can rely on Australian sunshine rather than scamming oil company petrol prices.

regards,
Nathan Lee

I would urge other members to tell NRMA what you think of their attempts to sabotage action on climate change in this way. Reduction in emissions from driving would also reduce a slew of other pollution that our obsession with cars has given us. We need to move to electric cars, widespread public transport (filling existing black hole areas and people getting out of cars) and fund renewable energy. The NRMA demanding petrol be taken out of the equation is not helping any of that.

Here’s some things the recent funding expansion could have been spent on that don’t violate parental right to a free, secular education in our public schools.

Qualified (Real) School Counsellors

Apparently the reason we need chaplains is because we don’t have enough counsellors to go round. Well, in 2010, across Australia, there were 6,743 government schools and as far as I can see from the salary figures for Australian school counsellors that would get us 3083 school counsellors or 2658 senior counsellors.
Let me do the division: that would be around 1 new counsellor to every 2 schools. Just the new counsellors alone would be a 1 to 751 ratio. If you look at the figures for 2008 ratios they’re:

• ACT 1: 850 (1 Assistant Manager, 5 Senior Counsellors, 45 FTE positions for School Counsellors)
• NSW 1 : 1,050 (678 Counsellors 113 DGOs 1 PEOs ie 1 per region across the state)
• NT: 1:2500 when all positions are full  (19 School Counsellors, 2 Senior. School Psychologists, 8 School Psychologists – however, rarely are all positions filled)
• Qld: 1:1,300 in secondary schools (about 350 combined GO and SGO positions)
• SA: 1:3779 for GO,  1:1944 for ECP (GO – 43.4 FTE in the field in 2008, with 3.1 FTE in specialist positions. ECP – 8.9 FTE in the field)
• Tas: 1 :1,800 (36 school psychologists, 8 senior school psychologists)
• WA: 1:1200 to 1:2000
• VIC: no data.

So you can see that those numbers are all blown out of the water (in a good way) if the money had gone to that. Of course the money could go toward the Northern Territory’s problem with hiring staff or to address the states with most urgent need. Or, hell, it could just go to paying the existing ones better pay so more staff are easily found and retained. For a government supposedly concerned about mental health it would surely make sense to hire qualified counsellors with that money rather than preachers who are only really there for a small percentage of the kids who are genuinely religious enough to need to talk to a religious ear.. and even then: only for certain types of advice (e.g. “I think I like my best friend in a sexual way” might not go down too well with an evangelist who thinks gays are sinful or unnatural).

Teachers

Despite Access Ministries actively trying to turn kids against teachers and toward Chaplains via propaganda teachers are the lifeblood of the school and are the real educators.

Teacher ratios in public schools are a problem thanks to the decade or so of the Liberal government under Howard systematically dismantling public education in favour of private education. You remember that right? Back when Abbott was just a RU486 hoarding health minister who couldn’t separate his faith from his ministerial responsibility.

Anyhow, $222m of wasted chaplaincy money could pay for 2220 teachers on a pretty healthy old $100k a year. Or let’s say we pay for a bunch of teachers on $70k, that would get public schools an extra 3,171 teachers.

As of 2010′s ABS figures there are 183,725 teachers.

So we could give them all a $1200 bonus for putting up with the less than desirable funding arrangement that neglects them in favour of funding for extra indoor swimming pools for private schools.

Renewable Energy for Schools

I’ve talked in the past about my view that government buildings should all have solar installations on the roof.

Divided amongst all the schools you could prepare a “renewable energy for schools” programme which would be a lump sum payment of $33k to purchase solar panels for the rooftops of the new school halls. This would help in many ways: it would reduce the electricity bill.

Solar panels could be on school halls

According to Origin energy’s FAQ a 1.5kW system starts at $4k. So let’s say $1k worth of extra cost. So every school could be a 9-10kW solar installation.

So that’s 6743x10kW = 67430kW = 6.7 MW distributed power station. Sure the real yield would be lower that that and you only generate for X hours per day.. But it’s a definite start toward freeing us from fossil fuel dependency.

School Gardens

Instead of learning the “historic fact” from a Christian Chaplain about how all of mankind was forever cursed and kicked out of the garden of Eden each school could get a $33k grant toward creating and maintaining a school garden. The garden could be used to encourage healthy eating or used as an ongoing fund raising device. The added advantage would be education going home via the kids as to what is actually in season, leading to better choices at the super market. With $33K you’d be able to do some serious gardening.

Simply planting some trees might also be a good use of the funding which would offset some of the emissions for heating/cooling the school.

Meals

The money could be used to supply a free apple or orange to every kid in the public school system every day for 20 weeks.

Apples for the students instead! No stories about snakes and gardens needed.

Or perhaps a decent sized fruit salad for half that time.

That’d surely help with the obesity rates and encourage healthy eating.

Books or Technology

Public schools, having to make do with giving away 2/3 of the federal funding to private schools, are lagging behind in adoption of technology like smart boards and computing facilities.  Schools could have $95 worth of extra spend per student on books or technology. So for every 10 students you could fund a laptop. So that’s two extra computers for every classroom. For a small school of 200 students that would be a computer lab. For every 50 students you could have a brand new smart board put into a classroom.

For the price of funding one god fearing chaplain at a school (at $20k of tax dollars) you could give an entire classroom of 20 kids a set of laptops for the year.

If you wanted to splash cash around you could pay a commercial IT consultant, Engineer or Scientist to come in once a week at consulting rates for 20-30 weeks to teach kids about technology rather than bronze age mythology. Which type of inspiration is likely to lead to a career that isn’t complete nonsense and sponging off Govt public schools violating our (supposed to be) secular education system?

Could hire a bunch of roaming consultants to educate the teachers in the technology they have as I know first hand just how little assistance teachers are given. Hell, I was the school technology expert all the way through my schooling from about year 3 onwards (I used to get called up from class in primary school by the high-school teachers to go help fix the clunky Microbee network). Although that was a useful life skill, I now do that with enterprise integration architecture problems.

Disadvantaged students

There are lots of kids in financial, emotional, physical or other disadvantage. I don’t have figures for these, but I guess I’ve touched on the special schools funding.

Let’s assume we can assist students via hiring people at $25/hour (minimum wage is lower, but let’s not be cheap with our chappy cash bonanza). That would pay for 1,184,000 days of paid helper time. So spread over the schools that would be 175 extra days per school, or 35 extra working weeks of hiring someone to come in. So spread that over a few part time people and you’ve got yourself a magic amount of extra assistance with reading, writing etc.

To give you the background: many public schools rely on volunteers currently. Now wouldn’t it be great to pay those people? If we paid $18-20/hour we’d get even more time out of people. Those people would not be there to convert by stealth, preach about nonsense (or in one instance at least of a chaplain grooming children).. No, they’re there to help without preaching.

This would also be a benefit to give people a good part time source of income, particularly mothers/fathers who have their kids at the school and who aren’t working elsewhere.

What else?

What else could the money have gone to that’s school/education related?

The environment is something I’m quite passionate about and like a lot of people I imagine: I get worried about the misquoting and lies that people are telling to justify continuing along without lifting our game.

Original letter

The letter I was responding to went like this:

Cheap energy must be given priority

Saturday’s front-page photograph of a wheat farmer knee-deep in mud should serve to remind us it was not so long ago that climate experts were predicting south-eastern Australia had moved into a state of permanent drought (“This drought may never break”, January 4, 2008).

The inability of climate experts to predict even a few years into the future casts much doubt on the credibility of their 50-year forecasts, and the extent to which man-made carbon emissions can affect these forecasts.

Politicians should take great care about formulating carbon emission policies that will result in large energy price rises based on the advice of those demonstrated to be frequently wrong in their predictions.

The climate does change: sometimes it gets drier and sometimes it wetter; sometimes it gets warmer and sometimes cooler. We would be better served by policies that recognise these cyclical changes occur and that result in securing our most critical resources: cheap water and energy.

Ron Blombery McMahons Point

To which I applied a bit of sceptical thinking to what he was claiming and thought “hey, that doesn’t sound like a prediction climate scientists would make”. Sure enough the original article “This drought may never break” made no such claim that if climate change was correct: we’d see no more rain..

My letter

My response to Ron Bombery’s misinterpretation of what was said:

Scientists didn’t come down in the last shower

Ron Blombery (Letters, December 6) wrongly says a rainfall prediction was made by climate experts in the 2008 article he cites. The story was very clear. It said: ”There is absolutely no debate that Australia is warming.” On the subject of drought (rainfall and temperature) it said: “There is a debate in the climate community, after … close to 12 years of drought, whether this is something permanent. Certainly, in terms of temperature, that seems to be our reality, and that there is no turning back.”

Short of reading only the headline (which says the drought ”may” never break, not ”will”), I fail to see how one could conclude that the scientists had staked the validity of climate science to a prediction of zero rainfall in a specific part of Australia. There was no failure of science, only a failure by Mr Blombery to read the article properly.

Nathan Lee Surry Hills

I think we have given preference to cheap energy plenty: cheap and dirty unfortunately. Mr Blombery needs to go to China to see what focussing on cheap energy, cheap manufacturing, cheap goods results in. So what if we’re wrong on climate change anyhow?
Looks like others agreed on the topic:

The recent rain is an example of weather, which is difficult to predict even a few weeks ahead due to its inherently chaotic nature. Climate is weather averaged out over a longer period. The recent rain does not somehow cancel out all the observations of the past

60 years that show south-east Australia is getting hotter and drier, or that the past decade has been the hottest on record.

The CSIRO’s State of the Climate Report 2010 confirms this, and points out that the number of record hot days has been rising since 1960, and the number of record cold days over the same period has been decreasing.

Unfortunately, too many politicians exhibit a similar level of logic and misunderstanding when it comes to differentiating between weather and climate, and this is partly why we find ourselves in the do-nothing position that characterises so much public policy associated with climate change.

Jim Russell Balmain

Cheap energy is the problem, not the solution. Whether or not carbon emissions are changing the climate, oil production is peaking and the coal and gas won’t last forever. The cheaper they are, the faster they run out. Raise the price and they last longer and encourage people to invest in alternative and renewable sources.

Hey presto, we postpone or even avoid wars over expensive, dwindling energy resources.

Jeffrey Mellefont Coogee

I love the Australian approach to climate change. “The climate does change: sometimes it gets drier and sometimes wetter; sometimes it gets warmer and sometimes cooler”. Onya Ron, problem solved, no worries. What do these bloody scientists know anyway?

Steve Durham Northbridge

Good to see there was a decent amount of column space to people replying to his climate change denial. I don’t think it’ll change his mind one little bit that he has managed to misread an article as supporting his view somehow when the scientist clearly said there’s no debate.

What if we're wrong on climate change?

I wonder at what point the guy reckons we stop focusing on cheap (dirty) energy? If not today: in 1 year? 5 years? 10 years? When the coal runs out and global temperature is many degrees higher? When we ARE able to predict that certain parts of Australia will be in permanent drought? When?

A search for Ron Blombery’s letters
It looks like Ron, like myself, likes to write letters to the SMH. It is easy to see why he thinks climate change is crap when he has shares in mining companies (or at least superannuation that he’s concerned about):
he doesn’t want them taxed more that’s for sure:

To fund our retirement, superannuation funds invest in businesses such as mining that offer good asset growth and dividends. Now the government is going to make these businesses pay a lot more tax, which will reduce their asset value and dividends. At the same time, it encourages us, and forces employers, to put more money into the superannuation system whose future returns it has just diminished. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

Ron Blombery McMahons Point

Perhaps they will move shares to green energy companies? Or do investors never sell shares?

He also seems concerned about the environmental benefits of the insulation scheme: though with a pro-mining, climate change denying stance it’s hard to see why he would care one little bit about environmental outcomes when he doesn’t think we’re changing the climate anyhow:

No one seems to be asking the most obvious question about home insulation: what did we get for $2.5 billion? The evidence shows we got rampant opportunism, skulduggery and employment of “the most vulnerable, youngest, unskilled workers” (”Spin and silver tongues can’t hide an empty morality”, February 18). But did the program achieve anything for energy conservation?

By now, a significant proportion of houses should be enjoying the benefits of new insulation. The energy companies can readily produce statistics on power consumed on comparable summer days this year and last year. If there were measurable benefits, surely the government would be telling us. Where are the results? Or did we just waste $2.5 billion?

Ron Blombery McMahons Point

Isn’t ripping out cheap coal and burning it despite clear evidence that it is polluting the atmosphere some sort of opportunism? Or is selling boatloads of it to China for cut price “opportunism”.

So perhaps instead of just thinking about purely financial matters: Ron should think about the future of the environment. If we dig up and burn away everything in the pursuit of Ron Blombery’s personal financial well being: we’ll not achieve much. We have to consider the children and grandchildren of Ron Blombery even if he won’t.

Electric vehicle fleet

A tonne of Government vehicles could be run on batteries and electricity for a number of reasons (this on conservative/out dated notions of what electric vehicles can do):

• short trips within urban areas (let’s assume electric means short range.. a myth but hey.. Let’s be conservative)
• idle time spent in other government spots or depots (which could easily have, or already have, electric outlets handy)
• large fleet purchasing power to kick the arses of the car manufacturers to stop stalling with proper electric cars (see “Who killed the electric car” if you want to get mad about it)

If nothing else the government could throw some money and give a big boost to the efforts of groups like Better Place who are rolling out electric vehicle infrastructure in Australia and other parts of the world (go to their site and get a bumper sticker if nothing else).

Electric vehicle street park-and-charge

Imagine never having to go to another petrol station again. Smelly, dirty places based around pumping stinky, dirty fuel into your vehicle. I’ve spent plenty of time at service stations while touring (I managed to make one video of that journey before I got distracted by work/life/play etc)

Sure, perhaps a way to win over the fuel supply guys would be to have removable battery packs (I’ve been talking about this for years..) and make removable batteries the equivalent of “fuel”:

That could work too.. But whether that’s done or not: Government car spots could have re-charging stations built in just as easily as they build in parking meters (and there are a growing number of those around aren’t there??). Hell, you could make it via induction plates on the ground hooked to some sort of RFID on the bottom of the car I’m sure wouldn’t be too much of a technological stretch.

At a minimum to support the move to an electric fleet any reserved parking spots for government vehicles should have recharge points. Then you could make certain public spots “electric only” (not to suggest it’s like a disabled parking spot.. far from it!). I have heard some rumblings that this is starting to happen for hybrid vehicles in some parts of the world. It’s an ok start, but we really need proper electric cars and infrastructure. Hybrids are always going to be a half arsed attempt to get away from oil. Plug-in hybrids are better, but really: we should just cut our losses (we’ll be paying off that environmental debt for some time now) and revel in the clean air in our cities as we push on with solar.

I only hope the car companies don’t pull the same shit that resulted in some perfectly good (and loved by owners) cars getting crushed rather than serve as a reminder that we could have ditched coal a long time ago. The idea of not selling but leasing electric vehicles smacks of that sort of thing all over again.

Businesses will get away with using as much energy, polluting as much as possible unless there is a cost attached to doing so. More than that actually, they have a duty to their shareholders actually to continue to pollute as much as possible while ever it is free to do so. So CO2, like any number of pollutants that had a cost attached via regulations/fines/taxes needs to have a cost associated. If you look back in time you’d see that any number of things have gone through this transition:

• lead
• asbestos
• CFCs
• DDTs
• etc

Prior to the health or environmental impact of the above triggering change it was the wild west type situation for businesses. Lead was in paint, added to petrol (gasoline for the yanks), smelters didn’t have to worry about minimising the contamination of ground water/soil around refinery/smelter operations. Then when the science and medical research came rolling in: it was either banned, phased out or required to be cleaned up (e.g. a fine last year for lead contamination). That made lead expensive to pollute with because it had to be treated with consideration to the impact on children etc.

Same deal with asbestos. It was (and still is) great for a number of things: heat proofing, building materials (the old version of “fibro cement” with asbestos was superior to the current cellulose variety (which is nowhere near as durable, strong, fire retardant or flexible.. seriously, asbestos is magic stuff). But while not as good in some ways, it doesn’t get into your lungs and cause nasty growths/cancers that will slowly kill you.

But back to global warming/climate change. What if we’re wrong about it?

I think the following cartoon sums up my thoughts on the matter:

The "horrible consequences" that await!

So I’ll take the argument from point of apathy: the “do you REALLY care” option.

• Does anyone care if they drive a petrol or an electric car if they both get you to and from your destination (assuming they start making them look half decent)? What if the electric one can be charged from the sun and doesn’t pollute the air around population centres?
• Would you care if you plugged in the car or dropped in a battery pack vs filling up with petrol? Battery packs should stink less and service stations look a bit cleaner (without run-off into drains etc).
• Does anyone care (or know for that matter) whether the electrons running your monitor that you’re reading this come from sunlight via solar cells or wind via wind farm or kite or does it HAVE to come via burning fossil fuels like coal? e.g. does your ability to put food on the table depend on energy being generated from fossil fuels, and if it does: could you possibly do one of the many new jobs away from coal?
• Would anyone notice if the hot water for the morning shower was heated via a solar hot water unit on the roof or is burning coal necessary for a good scrub temperature?
• Do you care if there are millions of new jobs in green industries created as environmentally dirty jobs are phased out?
• Do I care if my amazing Triumph Daytona 675 motorcycle is superseded by something sexy and electric like the MotoCzysz E1pc?

If you don’t really care about stuff like the above then keep your coal industry fibs to yourself, shut the hell up and let the people pushing for those things get on with the job. The absolute worse thing about these misinformed twits is that they are campaigning against improving the world for no other reason than because they want to go with the “do nothing and let everything get more polluted for our kids” option.

Want to see where we’re headed worldwide: take a look at China’s worst polluted spots for some hints (it isn’t pretty).

Yeah: what if it is (by some hugely unlikely plot by tens if not hundreds of thousands of scientists) a hoax and we end up with a world that doesn’t care about oil or coal. A state of being where we can let that shitty, dirty internal combustion technology retire into being another of those strange oddities in a transport museum (along with the coal fired steam engines and those planes with flapping wings failing on takeoff). If we lose the car noise and smoky exhaust smell in the cities and have the whir of electric driven wheels (or better yet trams/trains or electric buses) instead.

I would hope that certain jobs go quietly into the night and were replaced with many others:

• coal power plant technician
• oil rig drilling engineer
• internal combustion mechanic

Working in heavy dust, Chinese migrant workers invariably start to have health problems after 1-2 years.

Perhaps “replaced” with:

• solar array technician
• recycling engineer
• electric vehicle mechanic

But I suspect the anti-green Luddites and the climate change deniers will be digging in hard for many years to come.

Hard at work on the planting!

The morning began with an introduction (after a pickup at central or else self drive/ride/jog/whatever to homebush). Everyone seemed get stuck in and enjoy the weeding far more than they should have.

Weeding: fun for everyone.

It wasn’t quite “tree planting” because the habitat was for a bunch of green and golden bell frogs rather than Koalas or possums.

Green and gold frogs.. Australian colours! No, I didn't take this picture (wikipedia did!)

Had to chuckle when the guy talked about these little green buggers “hunting”. I guess they’re always presented as pretty innocent little things, unless you’re an insect of course then it’s a horrible eating mouth attached to tongue of death on springs.

Apparently they love popping up in areas like Homebush that were once industrial dumping grounds. Not so interested in living where the conditions are too easy for some reason. Maybe when the post apocalypse is over it’ll be green and gold bell frogs and cockroaches raging battles over the waste land?

It felt really good to be out and doing something more useful than sitting inside working on software for a day.

One planting done.. erm.. Hundreds to go!

It was pretty time consuming work getting rid of the weeds (and some native species of high seeding grass that would quickly take over the whole area) and planting native stuff. Apparently the frogs like to have clusters of grass together then open spaces for a few metres then cluster of grass and so on.

On the work front I think it was the first time some of the people had done any manual labour judging by the questions and the incredible amount of obvious type information given by the minders (e.g. “don’t stab yourself in the head”, “this is how you make a small hole with a tool”). Perhaps they were as bored with the instructions as I was. I guess that’s also side affect of lawsuits and our ever increasingly sedentary city based lives (particularly as I was the only male along too.. poor showing by the boys.. which further damaged the statistical likelihood that people would have done anything outdoors or used tools). Everyone seemed to have fun though and no one stabbed themselves in the head.

I think the following picture sums up the level of “hardcore” physical labour required (if you’re worried and considering doing some volunteering):

Redbacks and Blundstones have nothing on these pink bad boys one girl was wearing.

So the end result: we carted away a tonne (not literally.. but a Ute load) of weeds, planted native grasses/reeds and spread mulch/woodchips to keep it weed free for a bit longer.

My little grassy babies.. Aaw..

All in all a good day’s work.

Oh, one thing though, make sure you put sun cream on your lower back, just trust me on that one.

The report, prepared by the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, finds the cost increase to coal electricity generation if fully-fledged clean coal technology is installed will be up to 78 per cent.

78 percent! Assuming of course they can actually do it at all. To me it still smells like good old snake oil:

Premium quality clean coal snake oil. Guaranteed to prolong the inevitable.

So all that bleating about “nuclear is expensive” or “solar is expensive” is garbage. The alternatives are only expensive because their manufacturing waste needs to be dealt with rather than just puffed up the chimney into the atmosphere (well, unless it is pollution in China I guess.. Then it all probably ends up in the air, land or river regardless). It’s assuming there are the magic clean coal breakthroughs that allow the long term storage of carbon dioxide such that it won’t just float back up (I wonder if the cost of developing a brand new technology factors into this figure?).

The Government will spend $2.4 billion over nine years developing two to four commercial scale carbon capture projects.

It’s money spent on what will have to be dead technology. I mean it’d be great to have some magic process for capturing the CO₂ but I’d have to think the energy/resources that go into that will be so high as to be a waste of time in the long term.

I think we can do almost anything if we exert enough money, manpower and energy (hell, that’s why I want widespread renewable energy to have oodles of energy to do crazy stuff like desalination to overcome drought and remove pressure on rivers.. if you have the electricity for “free” then you can do that sort of thing AND repair the environment). But at some point you start making so little energy that it isn’t worth doing or you compromise on your original goal. I suspect coal companies will settle on a massive compromise. Like a small dick Hummer driver recycling a softdrink can and proudly proclaiming they are green, the coal industry will settle on locking away some small fraction of emissions or in such a way as to be non permanent. Perhaps it will be enough to deflect opponents sufficiently to milk another few decades.

Money spent on solar or wind generation is money on a real technology that works now and has many large scale installations worldwide. Carbon sequestration technology today (as far as I can tell) has no real viable option to long term lock away the gas. The closest we have to “capture” is pumping it into oil wells (to help squeeze more oil out). That notion of using it to help get out more carbon dioxide producing fossil fuels seems to me to not really be helping reduce overall emissions (e.g. “oh look, the coal’s emissions are buried to help us get hard to get oil which is then burnt in cars”).

The Glowing Green Green
I’d say if we’re going to have money spent on currently theoretical but likely looking: go the new generation IV reactors I reckon. We know that nuclear power generation works, because it powers big chunks of the population around the world. It’d power even more if not for the scaremongering.

Generation IV Nuclear reactor timeline. If we only get over demonising nuclear!

The advantage of some of these designs are that they can run off what we currently call waste, unlocking some of the large amount of remaining energy thus making use of the current stockpiles of waste from aging nuclear facilities.

But let’s get back to renewables.

Ideal “best” approach

The ideal best solution overall would be a combination:

1. using less energy to begin with
2. re-using things rather than endless/mindless consumption
3. solar
4. wind
5. geothermal/tidal/hydro/whatever other clean energy sources there are available for the locality

I think massive amounts could be attained via the first 4 of those things which require no new technology (next gen nuclear or magical as-yet-no-working-scale carbon dioxide capturing).

The first is definitely achievable as an article today “Pull the plug, it’s socket science” says:

ALL over the world, electrical appliances are blinking away on standby – and burning so much energy they need 60 coal-fired electricity stations a year to power them, analysis by the International Energy Agency has found.

And they go on to say that “efficiency is the fastest way to cut greenhouse gas emissions” and discuss the role of legislation (since market forces aren’t usually enough):

Dr Jollands believes legal standards on energy efficiency are important where the market is failing to deliver reform and cited the example of set-top boxes for pay television, which are usually switched on all day, every day.

In most homes and offices, set-top boxes are supplied by a company that has no incentive to make them energy efficient because the electricity bills are paid by the consumer. An analysis by the energy agency found that in the United States about 150 million switched-on set-top boxes burned the equivalent of six supertankers of oil a year.

Dr Jollands said there was a cultural aversion to regulation in some parts of the world, but if the market was not working, regulations could be effective without imposing additional costs.

I agree we need legislation to push this stuff forward. History has shown that left to their own devices things do not progress past the “what ever is cheapest”. You have to put a cost or penalty on polluting in order to get things cleaner.

Consumption is not success

The second thing (reusing and cutting back on consumption) would require a major shift in how we view a successful economy. This is probably a topic that requires its own blog, the idea of banishing consumption driven measures. But basically I think that consumption should NOT be the primary measure of success as it is currently because it largely consists of rewarding inefficiency and celebrating unnecessary buying of items. Consider the reuse of something in a consumption based economic model: bad! Bad because no new products are consumed, thus no new jobs making stuff, delivering stuff, stocking shelves, retailing etc.

Consume! Consume!

Should goods cost a bit more to be made robust, repairable and reusable? Hell no: that’s going to damage consumption down the track!

But back to clean coal: it’s no surprise the cost estimates are high because they’re just subsidised by society at large copping the pollution. Naturally when they start adhering to environmental standards they, like every other industry subject to environmental controls, will start to cost more. We already force other types of polluters to wear the costs of filtering, processing or otherwise dealing with waste: coal should have to do the same.

A few years back (ok a handful of years back.. I’m getting old) I had the “pleasure” of having a seat next to the trading floor while I was consulting at Macquarie bank. It was a fun team to be sitting with, but the constant roar of non-nonsensemustgetthistradecommunicatedtosomeonebyyellingquickly got a bit hard on the nerves. Sure: you were awake, but it was more of a fight or flight type instinct.

Unlike the economy, I escaped from the insurance bankers and got back to a quieter seat, but I’d have to say that too much exposure to that sort of environment day in day out would slowly but surely fray your nerves.

Shepard by the yellow river can't stand the pollution smell.

Villager in Guangdong province washes in polluted water.

Wroking in heavy dust, migrant workers invariably start to have health problems after 1-2 years.

See here for some explanations of the pictures, original source is from here.

Some other equally scary pictures from China (originally from here):

Man collecting dead fish in Guanqiao Lake in central China's Hubei province.

Migrant workers sort through industrial and household waste in Beijing.

I’ve posted in the past about the idea that China may solve global warming (kinda) because of the pressures such massive growth puts on it, but as I mentioned (at length): it is paying a hell of a price currently. Let’s hope with that comes the ability to clean-up the vast unliveable areas (and soon!).

TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment and Design. TED talks, in case you haven’t heard me rave about them (or watched one in a previous post) are short talks given by people on interesting ideas. Their motto is “Ideas worth spreading”.  TEDTalks came from TED conferences (I’d love to attend one one day) where a bunch of people get together to share ideas.

Here’s a quick handful that give you an idea of some of the incredible things that people present at TED talks. About the only ones I think fairly consistently suck are the song and poetry ones. Haven’t yet found a good one of either of those categories.

Mike Rowe celebrates dirty jobs
Captivating, engaging talk about how dirty jobs get a bad image.

Gever Tully teaches life lessons through Tinkering
Kids doing what they used to do before helicopter parenting and the death of fun.

Josh Silver demos adjustable liquid filled eye glasses
Amazing idea on self optometry for the masses.

Robert Full: Learning from the gecko’s tail
Nature is an incredible thing with surprising lessons for Engineers coming out about why the gecko needs a tail.

Jane Poynter: Life in Biosphere 2
I remember watching the Biosphere 2 people heading into the structure. Interesting to hear how things played out.

Aubrey de Grey says we can avoid aging
Aging need not be inevitable. Reasons why we should strive to beat aging. I first came across this idea under the banner “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS)“.

Jay Walker on the world’s English mania
English really is the international language. Scarily so!

Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote hacks
Unashamed geekery: making cool stuff with the wiimote.

Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen
Statistics done right!

Ed Ulbrich: How Benjamin Button got his face
Interesting technology used to age Brad Pitt.

Although my current job is a little lacking on presentations, I’ve ended up over the years with a bit of an appreciation for presentations (that’s why TED talks are pretty interesting to see various styles).

I liked his presentation for the part with the paper plane as a “prop” then a very real world way of comparing the energy output of different sized kite wings. Lots of good linking with analogies. Not the world’s best speaker (I still rate Bill Clinton for impeccable noise word free delivery), but the end effectiveness of the talk is the sum of the parts.

I’ve talked previously about China possibly solving global warming. It’d be fitting if they did this in part with one of their inventions: the kite.

Australia plans to build the world’s largest solar power station with an output of 1000 megawatts in a A$1.4 billion (US$1.05 billion) investment, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said on Sunday.

Finally! maybe this will be the boost that is needed to get solar over the tipping point from the niche “isn’t that a shiny expensive novelty” to something substantial. Or at least to the “isn’t that a shiny expensive widespread thing”.

Always good to compare things to the rest of the world:

“The government plans to invest with industry in the biggest solar generation plant in the world, three times the size of the world’s current biggest, which is in California,” Rudd said.

I think solar has enormous potential in Australia to cut down the amount of coal we’re burning for daytime things like air conditioners, factory equipment, aluminium smelters etc. Particularly when (as I’m still enjoying the novelty after the UK) we get so much bloody sunlight:

It’s a bit of a pity we’re also blessed with oodles of coal, which means Australia can afford to be lazy and polluting and still have enough electricity for everything.

As an aside: here’s an interesting quote from the long dead Thomas Edison from way back in 1931:

We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Natures inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. … I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.

Incidentally, he was talking to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone.

For practical solar hitting the mainstream: I’d like to see more use of dead space as solar collection areas. We’ve lots of roads/railway lines/rooftops that could surely be feeding back into the grid. Lots of space you can run strips of metre wide solar cells for long distances. All we really need is for the cost per unit and the ability to plug back into the grid without too many $$$$.

Anyhow, good to see a proven real technology like solar getting such a chunk of cash, rather than more bleating on about the hopes and dreams of a clean coal fantasy land. I’m hoping we get to a point where we just leave the coal in the ground and it becomes just another geological feature because we just don’t need it.

Oh and here’s another one:

and a cutesy cartoon one explaining the “science”:

More science:

Scary thing is that there are a tonne of serious ones from the coal industry making grandiose claims about technology that simply does not exist.

• ability to lay down the law
• massive market to apply new technology to
• lots and lots of money

So let me start by saying China is a horribly polluted place. The type of polluted that makes bushfire haze a clear day and makes effluent outfall water look like Evian spring water. Not only horribly polluted, but possessing some messed up socio/economic habits. An example of this is the willingness to trade in their environment, quality of life and ability to not have 3 headed babies for a quick buck.

There’s an overwhelming attitude problem that if something looks “kinda close enough”, then that’s good enough or that dumping pollution into rivers/land can be take place without consequence.

Some particularly shocking examples of this came up while I was living just over the border in Hong Kong:

• baby food that looked and smelled ok, but had zero nutritional content. Result: 50 to 60 dead kids who starved to death while the poor parents tried in vain to feed them with milk powder that was pretty much sawdust. (See http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/10/health/main616432.shtml )
• Use of a carcinogenic red dye (called sudan red) in duck eggs because the redder the yolk, the more they can sell ‘em for (see http://french.hanban.edu.cn/english/health/189567.htm ) and also in sauce (http://www.china.org.cn/english/health/209080.htm)
• Benzene slick down the river. This stuff causes leukaemia upon exposure! (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4545502.stm )
• Major pollution of the rivers, such that freshwater dolphins are now gone. (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6935343.stm)
• Fake medical supplies (see http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-01/08/content_10625425.htm and  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/jul/05/china.internationalnews1 )

Those are just some of the cases that spring to mind. This one kinda sums it up though:

Pollution from China blows out to sea. Image courtesy of NASA.

Anyhow, on to how this environment and how they might (kinda) fix it.

So China has the balls, ability and pliable population who are well trained to accept blanket decisions necessary for the massive change in lifestyle, technology and society that tackling climate issues demands. If coupled with blanket decisions that yield a good environmental outcome: they may well drag the necessary technologies from niche upper-middle-class-with-expendable-income to mass produced for peasants affordability.

An example of this ability to execute mass bans or decrees is the decision to ban motorcycles in Guangzhou (http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200611/14/eng20061114_321188.html). Now I don’t happen to think that this is going to necessarily have a good environmental outcome (more likely the opposite if people get cars instead), but it shows the sort of scale of sweeping authoritarian powers that China can swing into action. Try that in USA, UK, Australia and see how far it gets you. If you dig further and look into the darker areas where China has flexed its muscles: censorship. So successfully implemented (see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/internet/sidebyside.html) that uni students fail to recognise perhaps the most famous and powerful photograph of political protest and indeed of China (see http://www.stwr.org/india-china-asia/the-tank-man.html)

A survey of uni students in China revealed censorship to have been very successful. Most thought it was from another country.

The Chinese government has in various degrees stomped on, arrested, imprisoned, “disappeared” and executed countless people for disagreeing with the party lines or expected behaviours.

So that’s the “balls” and execution aspect (no pun intended).

The motivation for China is that world prices for resources are going up, as is their internal needs as well. This will continue to rise most likely exponentially. Their energy needs (to fulfill the USA, Australasia and Europe’s increasing desire for plastic trinkets to show self worth) are going through the roof. So short of military action to secure supplies of diminishing oil/gas/coal: they’ll have to look elsewhere. This elsewhere is likely to be from renewable energy.

Wind energy not just hot air in China

An article (see http://ecoworldly.com/2008/07/03/energy-experts-say-chinas-wind-energy-could-grow-1667-by-2020/) talks of how China is exceeding their targets for wind energy and are likely to increase their wind energy sources by 1667% by 2020. Another article (see http://www.cleantech.com/news/3815/china-drives-global-wind-energy-supply-market) says that China has the fastest growing wind energy market. The rest of the world is struggling with NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) or pseudo environmentalism bullshit, government apathy and planning hurdles to the point where they’re almost crippled when it comes to actually executing on plans for renewables or affordable nuclear over coal fired power stations.

I predict it won’t be long before China’s dabbling in electric bikes turns into enforced decrees about electric/hybrid cars.

Meanwhile we’ll have the same old stories of misdirected consumer/voter energy as ridiculous ideas like “reduce the tax on petrol/gasoline” are the best we can come up with elsewhere. Want to live in a huge house, buy lots of shit we don’t need, eat 10 kilos of meat a day followed by a 2Litre bucket of coke while driving a hummer h2 with 1 mile per gallon fuel efficiency, but expect both the cost of living and quality of life to improve as well as the environment sort itself out? Get ready for a severe reality check. But hey, maybe reducing taxes will put off that reality check by a month or two while we pointlessly worry about plastic bags instead.

So while the stream of coal, oil will continue into China at increasing rates, when the crunch time comes China will have massive investments in the “other” options that the industrialised nations are putting off because they can (with a bit of whinging) withstand because they can afford them.

It can’t NOT go green

In short China can’t afford NOT to cut itself off from oil/gas/coal as soon as possible. It has money, sure, but thrift is the name of the game when you’re talking a billion or so citizens wanting refrigerators and transport.

Want a car? All cars in China must be electric. The only whining allowed is the whine of an electric drive train.
Want a house? You’ll have to put 5 square metres of Mao’s best solar cells on the roof and a little red transformer box or it’ll be bulldozed.
Need a job? We need a million workers sticking propellers on small scale wind generators, and another million sticking the “made in china” stickers on the propellers.
Don’t want a wind farm, nuclear plant, tidal generator or solar farm in your backyard: tough. Protest and you’ll disappear like all those before you.

How will this help? Well it’ll hopefully bring down the price of technology, give other governments a kick up the arse when they get left for dead as China becomes the world’s super power while the rest of the developed world struggles to support an industry nearly entirely dependent on oil and coal.
Sure, China will have by that stage pretty much guaranteed their people will be unable to drink clean water, eat food free of countless carcinogens or see 10 metres down the road on most days due to the street level nature of the cloud in “The land of the great white cloud”: but they’ll have main-streamed the solar/wind/nuclear technology and mass produced it for 5 bucks a pop which will (I hope) give the rest of the world some viable options to fix their problems while they debate on the colour of the promotional fridge magnets for members of the community consultation committee for deciding the font to be used in the applications for the environmental impact statement studies for a trial wind farm project.
That’s if China hasn’t experienced the (quite justified) mass uprising against the big brother nature of their existence. If so: they can join the rest of us in our paralysis of social freedoms as the end grows ever nearer.